SERMON: "Living As Love Demands: What Muhammad Said"
Rev. Paul Beedle
October 7, 2007
According to Emily Post, the original maven of manners: “Manners are a sensitive awareness of the feelings of others. If you have that awareness, you have good manners, no matter what fork you use.” That's almost my whole message this morning, in a manner of speaking.
I want to talk about what Muhammad said about living as love demands. The source of what Muhammad said is the collection of reports about what he did and said called “Hadith.” There are six collections of Hadith that Sunni Muslims regard as reliable sources of what Muhammad said. This Manual of Hadith from my library draws from all six of those collections and more. Here's a Hadith that, from a Western point of view, might be the most striking of them. It's attributed to Ali, Muhammad's son:
“Ali said, the Messenger of Allah, peace and blessings of Allah be upon him, said: `A Muslim owes to a Muslim six duties to be bestowed liberally –
They say the Golden Rule is in every human religion – there it is in Islam!
Now besides the presence of the Golden Rule, there are a couple more interesting things about this sample of what Muhammad said about living as love demands. One is that it was written down at least 200 years after the Quran. In the beginning, the Quran was recited, not written. The story of the Quran is that Muhammad was asleep during Ramadan, and heard a voice from heaven saying “Recite! Recite! Recite!”, and when he woke he had the first part of the Quran written on his heart. The word “Quran” means “the direct speech of God” in Arabic. So it's not what Muhammad said, it's what Muhammad repeated. Muhammad died in 632, and most scholars agree that the Quran was first written down about 650, by order of his third successor as leader of the Muslim community, the Caliph Uthman. After Muhammad's death, men called Qurra – authorized reciters and teachers of the Quran – spread throughout the Muslim community to facilitate worship and learning. By the second generation of Qurra, variations began to appear in what they recited. So Uthman ordered production of a standard text – authorized and universally binding – and rounded up all other written versions and burned them. This angered Muslim leaders in outlying areas such as Syria, Egypt and Iraq, who felt Uthman was exceeding his authority as Caliph. Uthman responded by branding anyone who questioned his standard version of the Quran as an unbeliever. This sparked revolts against him, and finally he was murdered by rebels when he refused their demands to step down from power. The story is told that he was reading the Quran when they broke into his palace, and held it open before him all the while they talked; and when they killed him, he fell forward onto his open book and his blood soaked its pages.
All of the six “reliable” collections of Hadith were written down in the 9th century, and further collections and commentaries about what Muhammad did and said continued to be made. Uthman succeeded in stopping the development of what God said (the Quran), and thus restricting the range of commentary on it, but not the development of written versions of what Muhammad said. The Hadith I read to you appears in a 14th-century revision of a 12th-century collection, which drew it from the collection considered 5th most reliable of the six “reliable” collections. Is the Golden Rule part of Islam? It's not in the Quran, and perhaps some would say that this Hadith – while in a “reliable” collection – is not authentic. Whether or not the Golden Rule is part of Islam depends – even for Muslims – upon how one views Islam.
The other interesting thing about this Hadith is that it is attributed to Ali. Ali succeeded Uthman as Caliph. A civil war resulted. Ali, Muhammad's son, symbolically united the roles of prophet and Caliph, and deeply divided the Muslim community. Some thought the roles should be separate – that state authority and religious authority should be separate. That was the objection to Uthman's action to standardize the Quran. Others felt Ali should be Caliph. They were called Shi'atu Ali – the Party of Ali – or Shi'ah. Ali lasted about a year and a half as Caliph before being deposed; Uthman's family became the rulers of the first Muslim empire, the Umayyad Dynasty. And the standardized Quran survived.
The Shi'ah came to view Ali not merely as the deposed fourth Caliph, but as a model of piety – “best in speech...best in worship...best in faith” – who should have succeeded Muhammad not as the fourth Caliph but as something more than that: they regard him as the first Imam, or “Proof of God on Earth.” In general, an Imam is a teacher and a guide to the hidden meanings of the Quran, or simply one who stands at the front of the mosque to lead the congregation in prayer. Ali, as Caliph, had tried to make his position an office of religious piety if not religious authority. He tried to live out of his faith and wear his authority in the spirit of his faith. So he was a kind of example, that's why the Shi'ah think of him as the first Imam.
The spirit of Shi'ite Islam is one of sorrow and sacrifice. There is a kind of resemblance between Shi'ism and Christianity in that regard. Shi'ah ask themselves if they would have stood by Ali in the way Christians ask whether they, like Peter, would have denied Christ three times. And both faiths have strong teachings regarding the worth of self-sacrifice. Both faiths also found themselves first in political opposition to empire, and later in possession of it. But when Shi'ism came to power, it was not as a new religion but as a variant. Sunni Islam did not fade as the old Greek and Roman religions did. And if a Muslim owes it to a Muslim to love for him what he loves for himself, then Shi'ah and Sunni were called to coexist where Christians were called to convert. Shi'ah, Sunni and Christian traditions alike were shaped by the problems and worries of empire and power. Shi'ite Imams taught an authoritative interpretation of the faith, Sunni Ulama expounded an authoritative text of the Quran, and Christian bishops developed creeds.
And then came the Sufis.
In his book No God But God, Reza Aslan [1] compares the Sufi and Shi'ah reactions to “the Imperial Islam of the Muslim Dynasties and the rigid formalism of Islam's `orthodox' learned class, the Ulama. Both sects [sought] to uncover the hidden meaning of the Quran, both concentrated their spiritual activities on devotion to the Prophet Muhammad, and both developed cults of personality around saintly characters – [Shi'ah] Imams or [Sufi] Pirs. But while the Shi'ah and Sufis existed in the same spiritual dimension and most certainly influenced each other, Sufism [is] dedicated solely to esotericism and devotionalism. ...unlike the Shi'ah, the Sufis were not interested in political power. Although they eventually entered the political realm, especially in the Indian subcontinent, the Sufi Pirs initially eschewed all temporal authority and completely removed themselves from the political and theological infighting that pervaded the Muslim community during its formative period. Instead, the Sufis strove toward asceticism and detachment from ... worldly trappings through a life of simplicity and poverty. `If you cannot change the kings,' the Sufis argued, `then change yourself.'”
Aslan writes: “Of all the principles that the Sufi disciple must integrate into his life, none is more important than the principle of love. Love is the foundation of Sufism. It is the language through which Sufism is most perfectly expressed and the sole avenue through which its ideals can be understood. The experience of love represents the most universal station on the Sufi Way, for it is love – not theology and certainly not the law – that engenders knowledge of God.
“According to the Sufis, God's very essence – God's substance – is love. Love is the agent of creation. Sufism does not allow for the concept of creation [out of nothing] because, before there was anything, there was love; that is, God loving God's self in a primordial state of unity. It was only when God desired to express this love to an `other' that humanity was created in the image of the Divine. Humanity, then, is God made manifest; it is God objectified through love.
“When Sufis speak of their love for God, they are not referring to ... spiritual love; quite the opposite. This is a passionate, all-consuming, humiliating, self-denying love. ... Love, according to Attar, is the fire that obliterates the ego and purifies the soul, and the lover is he who `flares and burns'...”
Now, whenever love is spoken of in this way, we know that we are dealing with the realities of our interior experience. To speak of obliterating the ego and purifying the soul is a reference to the thawing phase of our normal, healthy patterns of spiritual growth. We form beliefs and a picture or understanding of ourselves and the world in order to have a sense of grounding, of foundation, of a “there there” or a home base from which we relate to others and the elements. That's the freezing phase. And then when that house of belief becomes, as John Patrick Shanley put it, “one room with no way out,” when it becomes too small to account for all that we experience and all that we know ourselves to be or to contain, we thaw: we doubt, we deconstruct, we rethink, we obliterate the too-small ego in order to purify and unite that large and flowing soul within us.
Often the thaw comes upon us as a yearning. We want something in us named or affirmed or exercised and developed. Many times in romantic love, part of the attraction we feel for our loved one is something active or manifest in them that we long to develop in ourselves, but are only dimly aware of that longing. The less we are aware or able to articulate that longing, the more we experience it as a longing for the other and a sense that our loved one “completes” us. And it's that kind of passion that Sufis divert away from anything in their outer life and toward God, who is reached somewhere beyond our outer life – either within ourselves, or in our relationship to the world but not in the world, or just “beyond.” The symbol of mystical union with God points toward this process of thawing and new becoming; God in some way represents an ideal or perfection toward which we strive but of course never reach. Yet we may feel at one with or immersed in that ideal, that great goodness or great love.
So what Islam says to me, taken as a whole, is that there's love and there's love. There's the Emily Post sort of love – sensitive awareness of the feelings of others – that reaches religious proportions in the Golden Rule, what Christians call agape and Buddhists call “compassion” and others call “unconditional love.” And then there's the love that is the divine freeze and thaw of spiritual growth. It's not a question of choosing between them. They go together, and each dies without the other. Rather, it's a question of knowing the difference. And the easiest way to know the difference is by feel. The Golden Rule sort of love feels calm, detached, open, spacious, welcoming. The other sort feels agitated, passionate, focused, confined, yearning. The first invites diversity and difference, the second seeks unity and participation in a larger whole to which we all belong. The love that seeks unity surrenders to the freeze and thaw of spiritual growth; the love that invites difference sets it a splendid table in a mansion with many rooms to accommodate all the freezing and thawing that goes on among us. Both loves are essential to us and to each other, but they are different. The Golden Rule love that sets a splendid table is the love we direct toward one another; the passion of the freeze and thaw is properly reserved for God, the Sufis and mystics would say, or for the larger Self we strive to become or the larger whole we strive to be part of.
What Muhammad said – or what Ali said Muhammad said, or what they say Ali said Muhammad said – is that we should love for others what we love for ourselves. What Rumi said is that the man of God is in hiding, and we look for the man of God everywhere. And what Emily Post said is that if you have “a sensitive awareness of the feelings of others..., you have good manners, no matter what fork you use.” May we remember that deep passion of the kind that accompanies the freeze and thaw of spiritual growth is among the feelings of others, and may we remember to be sensitive to that passion and make room for it in our midst. So may it be. Amen.
[1] Reza Aslan, No God But God (New York: Random House, 2005). My account of early Islam as well as of Sufism follows Aslan.